ActiveCampaign Review - The Height of Automation?

Inka Wibowo

Jan 15, 2019

ActiveCampaign has been working towards having marketers send fewer email, while also allowing them to achieve better results. Boasting many features and integrations, as well as quick and friendly support, they do sound like a powerhouse newsletter marketing tool.

One of the most important features of this Chicago-based company is its automations. Not only does it allow autoresponders, based on myriad conditions, but it also allows automation of your contacts and list management, as well as automations within its CRM system (known as ‘Deals’). This ‘Deals’ system is also worth noting, and allows you to add notes to contacts, set up appointments or simply send direct messages to them. In addition to that, they recently launched a site messages feature. Using it you can send targeted messages straight to your website visitors.

And, while at first glance pages such as the Dashboard can seem a little busy and overly complicated, it’s not hard to understand how useful it is to have all your information in one place.

This might only be considered a con if you’re after a quick and simple email solution. There are simpler newsletter services out there, so you may want to look elsewhere if this is all you need.

Is ActiveCampaign the right newsletter service for you?

Recommended if:

You’re serious about marketing automation:

ActiveCampaign is hands-down the most powerful automation tool we’ve tested, allowing you to set up virtually any automation you can think of – triggered campaigns, sales follow-ups, automated segmentation, dynamic email content and so on.

You need an integrated sales and marketing platform for your business:

ActiveCampaign’s inbuilt CRM seamlessly links up to all your email marketing data, allowing sales teams to act quickly. Features like lead scoring and social data can also help to streamline your sales follow-up processes.

You need a tool that performs multi-channel marketing:

Apart from sending emails, ActiveCampaign also allows you to send SMS, personalized ‘Site Messages’ to website visitors, and even manage how Facebook ads are displayed to contacts. It’s a great solution if you’d like to be able to centralize a good chunk of your marketing.

Not recommended if:

You need a low-maintenance, beginner-friendly tool:

ActiveCampaign is an advanced tool, and getting familiarized with it takes a lot more work than other tools. Not to mention the regular maintenance you’ll need to set up, monitor and optimize campaigns.

You only need simple automations:

If you only want to set up basic email sequences (for example, a welcome campaign), we’d recommend more budget-friendly options like MailerLite or Benchmark, which are far easier to use. Otherwise, you’ll be paying for a tonne of extras (and complexity) that you simply won’t need.

You’re not sure:

Unfortunately, there’s no free plan, and with a trial period of just 14 days, they don’t give you much time to assess whether it’s right for you.

Rating details

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Ease of Use

ActiveCampaign have a very user-friendly design, with menus being easily navigable. The dashboard, which could feel crowded if not designed correctly, has a useful ‘Getting Started’ slider to help new users. And it has demo data to give you an idea of how best to use sections. It may be a little complicated for the absolute beginner though.

Newsletter Creation

Editor

The editor is fast, and has a couple of handy features One is saving custom ‘blocks’ to reuse, and the other is allowing you to see changes other people have made, Google Docs-style. Although finding your last action to undo can be painstaking due to multiple auto-saves every minute! Another issue we had was in trying to create columns, this was needlessly finicky and didn’t give us the desired effect.

Personalization

An easy to use If/Then/Else logic is available via ‘conditional content’ which allows you to show certain customers different content based on certain conditions like interests, links clicked in the past etc.

ActiveCampaign have around 40 modern, responsive templates to choose from. You can handily preview them in another window. Other tools offer more template options, and also slightly more features/content blocks within the editor.

Email Automation

Their marketing automation really is the one to beat for newsletter tools. It’s extremely powerful, and very user-friendly, allowing you to automate follow-up campaigns, edit multiple conditions and much more. This is all done via an easy-to-use flow chart-style system. There are also pre-made ‘recipes’ for you to use, or get ideas from, otherwise you can start your own automation from scratch. Learn more in these video tutorials.

List Management

Compared to some other tools, managing contacts and lists is made much easier, and automated, due to being able to use their automation functions to organise people into lists. Learn more here.

Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process

Easy to use, can create your own fields, and it also allows you to create floating forms. If you input the web address you want to add the form to, it even brings up the page in the background to see how it looks together. Simple but effective.

Deliverability

In our deliverability tests ActiveCampaign scored the best out of all our tested tools, including with the most popular providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and AOL.

The site is only available in English, yet they pick up points for the implementation of a volunteer translation site for multiple languages. You still have to search and implement these yourself though.

Further Features

Spam- and Design-Testing

These are both available. Spam testing is simply a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ that you get before you send out your campaign, yet there are no factors present to help understand the ruling. An email client preview is available, too, but at a price of $1 per test/client, which seems a bit steep.

Bounce Management

Soft bounces are counted as hard bounces after three times, and this then puts them in an exclusion list.

Blacklist

This is the aforementioned ‘exclusion list’. You can import contacts directly into this list, and export too.

It’s possible to use your own tracking domain to improve your newsletter’s company branding.

Different levels of account access

This is a very flexible system, without specific levels. You define the group names and also the exact access for each of those groups via tick-boxes.

Integrations

ActiveCampaign offer a massive amount of integration options, such as PayPal, Shopify, Google Analytics, Facebook and WordPress. You shouldn’t have a problem finding what you need. Find all integrations here.

Landing Page Editor

This is not available.

Support

5/5

Support is fast and friendly, via all mediums. Their knowledge base is particularly useful and easily searchable, I had very little difficulty finding relevant search results. They also have video tutorials available, webinars (live and archived) and one-on-one training on the ‘Plus’ plan.

Overall rating

4.7/5

ActiveCampaign is one of the most powerful newsletter tools on the market. Hardly missing a thing when it comes to features, and also simple enough for most people to make full use of them.

Conclusion

It’s really tough to fault ActiveCampaign, not only do they offer almost everything you need within a newsletter marketing tool, but they do it very well. The reporting offers you insight into almost all facets, such as page visits, geo-tracking, openers and more. The only thing lacking in that area is the ability to track purchases on your website. Another area that is slightly lacking is the newsletter editor, not offering an experience as slick as other tools out there, with a few niggling features that could be done better (like the revision history).

The support is as advertised: friendly, helpful and fast. Email and chat support are great, with a personal feel to the communications. Their knowledge base is easily searchable and actually returns relevant results a high percentage of the time. With their ‘Plus’ plan you even get access to one-on-one training and helpful webinars, which is a nice addition.

ActiveCampaign really are one of the best choices you could make if you’re looking for an all-in-one newsletter marketing tool. Their automation is the real deal, and makes other tool’s versions of this pale in comparison. You’ll need to be prepared to put in a bit of time, and perhaps spend a little more money, but your business will reap the rewards. If, on the other hand, you’re just looking for a simple way to blast out newsletters, a solution like GetResponse or MailerLite might be a bit easier to get your head around.

ActiveCampaign Alternatives

MailerLite

GetResponse

SendinBlue

MailerLite is one of the most affordable solutions, in fact, their free plan is very generous. Their approach to email marketing design is admirable, offering well modern-looking templates. It’s also one of the easiest tools we’ve ever used.

GetResponse is a powerful alternative to ActiveCampaign with loads of pro options (e.g. a webinar tool) and good automations. Unlike ActiveCampaign, they offer their platform in more than 20 languages, and their design and testing tools are top notch.

SendinBlue: this French provider is one of the cheapest you’ll find. Their registration forms are pretty flexible and allow for interesting personalizations. They are available in 6 languages and have a nice feature that will let you preview your campaigns in different email clients.

Still not sure which is the right newsletter tool for you? Try our Smart Finder.

About Inka Wibowo

Coming from a digital agency background, Inka has helped businesses of all shapes and sizes to get their email marketing up and running. Now, she's excited to be helping businesses in a different way - by equipping them with the information they need to find cost-effective, easy-to-manage tools for their email marketing.